Monday, December 6, 2010

Most weeks, I review more DVDs than the Indy can fit into print. You can look for extra write-ups here, on the IndyBlog.

THE TERROR WITHIN / DEAD SPACE (Rated R)Shout! Factory

Before Al Gore made An Inconvenient Truth, legendary producer Roger Corman was going green on film by recycling everything from sets and costumes to scripts and actors, a selfless act that is fully realized in the double-feature of The Terror Within and Dead Space. In Terror, Andrew Stevens leads the last survivors of a chemical plague as they fight a mutant humanoid in a bunker beneath the Mojave Desert. Meanwhile, in Dead Space, the script for Corman's 1982 Forbidden World is given the once-over bargain-basement redux treatment, with Beastmaster's Marc Singer taking the reins as a hilariously ineffectual action hero who does his best to stop a viral monster on a remote spaceship. Two times the fun, this latest edition in the Corman Double Feature line has inspired me to make the world a better place. Thanks, Rog!

CANNIBAL GIRLS (Rated R)Shout! Factory

For all intents and purposes, 1973's Cannibal Girls is a thoroughly unwatchable movie, even by the standards of a most steadfast B-movie obsessive such as myself. But, that quibble aside, one can't ignore the cinematic historical significance of it: It was one of the first films of legendary comedic director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) and stars the pre-SCTV duo of Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin. And while you can easily see the promise these guys have, the movie is very much a hippie-ethos concoction filled with improvised dialogue that goes nowhere, and a nice amount of forced camp that was dated by 1974. Still, with the legendary comedic prowess behind Cannibal Girls, one wishes that Reitman and company, with all those years of experience and education, would revisit it in a sequel of some sort. It would certainly be better than My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

ExTERMINATORS (Rated R) (Blu-Ray)Image Entertainment

Movies like ExTerminators always bother me more than they should. Sure, it's supposed to be a light-hearted black comedy in the Heathers vein, but the deeper I dwell on it, the more it sticks in my craw from a purely politically correct standpoint: ExTerminators is about a group of women who are so mad at men that they start a company that specializes in murdering ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands. Why is this considered an empowering comedy, while if a movie was made about men killing their exes, it would be a flaming pile of misogynistic hate-speech? It just doesn't seem fair to me. But, that qualm aside, the only thing even more offensive to me is that ExTerminators, even with a cast including Heather Graham and Jennifer Coolidge, is insanely unfunny and totally unnecessary.